We feature the best pasta recipes – authentic, classic and creative recipes, quick and easy how-to preparation videos, healthy Mediterranean diet tips, dining and travel recommendations, and more.

Are you ready? You’re about to join us for a must-have pasta experience:

• Authentic, classic and creative pasta recipes and techniques that will enable you to compete with the best Italian restaurants – right in your own kitchen.
• Satisfy every food craving you have with recipes that bring out pasta’s flavor, texture, and infinite variety.
• Make and enjoy pasta recipes for breakfast, lunch, snack, or dinner.
• Learn why we lean to the crunchier side of Al Dente in most of our pasta recipes.
• Watch how-to videos of our guest chefs and talented amateur cooks preparing recipes of authentic dishes or their own creative inventions.
• WARNING: some of our recipes and techniques are so simple ANYONE can learn them.

We hope you like the site and enjoy: trying out some of our recipes — authentic recipes, classic recipes and creative recipes;  viewing our how-to pasta preparation videos; perhaps learning something new about pasta, the Mediterranean diet, health-tips, dining and travel in Italy; and more.  Thank you for visiting and please send in your comments. We’re always improving the site and want to hear your opinion on what you might like to see here.

Some Pasta history  [ Wikipedia excerpt ]

What we now know as “pasta” originated in Italy.  While many different cultures ate some sort of noodle-like food, composed mostly of grain, the key characteristics of pasta are durum wheat semolina, with a high gluten content, made with a technique that allows the resultant mixture to be highly malleable.  Thus, the many different shapes (i.e., ziti, spaghetti, ravioli) and uses in various recipes.

South of Europe, in Arab North Africa, a similar food has been eaten for centuries: cous-cous.

The works of the 200 AD Greek physician Galen mention itrion, homogeneous compounds and recipes made up of flour and water. The Jerusalem Talmud records that itrium, a kind of boiled dough, was among the most common recipes in Palestine from the 3rd to 5th centuries AD.  A dictionary compiled by the 9th century Syrian physician and lexicographer Isho bar Ali defines itriyya, the Arabic cognate, as string-like shapes made of semolina and dried before cooking [ The Pasta Channel plans to post some recipes loosely based on itriyya ].  One form of itriyya with a long history is laganum (plural lagana), which in Latin refers to a thin sheet of dough, and gives rise to a variety of early Italian “lasagna” recipes.  [ The Pasta Channel plans to post recipes for Lasagna based on itriyya ]

In 100 BC writings of Horace, various recipes for lagana consisted of fine sheets of a flour mixture that were fried and were essentially an everyday food.  Writing in the 2nd century Athenaeus of Naucratis provides recipes for lagana which he attributes to the 1st century Chrysippus of Tyana.  An early 5th century cookbook describes several recipes for a dish called lagana that consisted of layers of dough with meat stuffing, a possible ancestor of modern-day Lasagna recipes. But the method of cooking these sheets of dough does not correspond to our modern definition of Pasta recipes.

The first concrete information concerning Pasta in Italy dates from the thirteenth or fourteenth century.  The question of Pasta’s origin continues to evoke speculation.